The Winds of Wonder

Apropos of Two Vast Negations — 8

Savitri Book Seven Canto Four

Dream of God and know Him

“O Savitri, I am thy secret soul. ||124.6||

I have come down to the wounded desolate earth

To heal her pangs and lull her heart to rest

And lay her head upon the Mother’s lap

That she may dream of God and know his peace

And draw the harmony of higher spheres

Into the rhythm of earth’s rude troubled days. ||124.7||

I show to her the figures of bright Gods

And bring strength and solace to her struggling life;

High things that now are only words and forms

I reveal to her in the body of their power. ||124.8||

In the anomalies of the human heart

Where Good and Evil are close bed-fellows

And Light is by Darkness dogged at every step,

Where his largest knowledge is an ignorance,

I am the Power that labours towards the best

And works for God and looks up towards the heights.||124.10||

Many are God’s forms by which he grows in man;

They stamp his thoughts and deeds with divinity,

Uplift the stature of the human clay

Or slowly transmute it into heaven’s gold. ||124.13||

He is the prophet’s voice, the sight of the seer. ||124.17||

He is Beauty nectar of the passionate soul,

He is the Truth by which the spirit lives. ||124.18||

He is the riches of the spiritual Vast

Poured out in healing streams on indigent Life;

He is Eternity lured from hour to hour,

He is Infinity in a little space:

He is Immortality in the arms of Death. ||124.19||

These powers I am and at my call they come. ||124.20||

Thus slowly I lift man’s soul nearer the Light. ||124.21||

I bring meanwhile the gods upon the earth;

I bring back hope to the despairing heart;

I give peace to the humble and the great

And shed my grace on the foolish and the wise. ||124.24||

I shall save earth, if earth consents to be saved. ||124.25||

Then Love shall at last unwounded tread earth’s soil;

Man’s mind shall admit the sovereignty of Truth

And body bear the immense descent of God.” ||124.26||

The Denial

A voice of the sense-shackled human mind

Carried its proud complaint of Godlike power

Hedged by the limits of a mortal’s thoughts,

Bound in the chains of earthly ignorance. ||124.28||

Imprisoned in his body and his brain

The mortal cannot see God’s mighty whole

Or share in his vast and deep identity

Who stands unguessed within our ignorant hearts

And knows all things because he is one with all. ||124.29||

Man only sees the cosmic surfaces. ||124.30||

He sees the naked body of the Truth

Though often baffled by her endless garbs,

But cannot look upon her soul within. ||124.32||

Then, furious for a knowledge absolute,

He tears all details out and stabs and digs:

Only the shape’s contents he holds for use;

The spirit escapes or dies beneath his knife. ||124.33||

He sees as a blank stretch, a giant waste

The crowding riches of infinity. ||124.34||

The soul’s revealing contacts are not his. ||124.36||

Yet is he visited by intuitive light

And inspiration comes from the Unknown;

But only reason and sense he feels as sure,

They only are his trusted witnesses. ||124.37||

A cosmic pathos trembled in its tone. ||124.39||

“I am the mind of God’s great ignorant world

Ascending to knowledge by the steps he made;

I am the all-discovering Thought of man. ||124.40||

I am a god fettered by Matter and sense,

An animal prisoned in a fence of thorns,

A beast of labour asking for his food,

A smith tied to his anvil and his forge. ||124.41||

Yet have I loosened the cord, enlarged my room. ||124.42||

I have mapped the heavens and analysed the stars,

Described the orbits through the grooves of Space,

Measured the miles that separate the suns,

Computed their longevity in Time. ||124.43||

I know how he was born and how he dies;

Only what end he serves I know not yet,

Or if there is aim at all or any end

Or push of rich creative purposeful joy

In the wide works of the terrestrial power. ||124.47||

I have seen the ways of life, the paths of mind;

I have studied the methods of the ant and ape

And the behaviour learnt of man and worm. ||124.50||

If God is at work his secrets I have found. ||124.51||

But still the Cause of things is left in doubt,

Their truth flees from pursuit into a void;

When all has been explained nothing is known. ||124.52||

What chose the process, whence the Power sprung

I know not and perhaps shall never know. ||124.53||

My great philosophies are a reasoned guess;

The mystic heavens that claim the human soul

Are a charlatanism of the imagining brain:

All is a speculation or a dream:

In the end the world itself becomes a doubt:

The infinitesimal’s jest mocks mass and shape,

A laugh peals from the infinite’s finite mask. ||124.57||

Even if a greater consciousness I could reach,

What profit is it then for Thought to win

A Real which is for ever ineffable

Or hunt to its lair the bodiless Self or make

The Unknowable the target of the soul? ||124.59||

Nay, let me work within my mortal bounds,

Not live beyond life nor think beyond the mind;

Our smallness saves us from the Infinite. ||124.60||

In a frozen grandeur lone and desolate

Call me not to die the great eternal Death,

Left naked of my own humanity

In the chill vast of the spirit’s boundlessness. ||124.61||

Human I am, human let me remain

Till in the Inconscient I fall dumb and sleep. ||124.63||

A high insanity, a chimera is this,

To think that God lives hidden in the clay

And that eternal Truth can dwell in Time,

And call to her to save our self and world. ||124.64||

How can man grow immortal and divine

Transmuting the very stuff of which he is made? ||124.65||

This wizard Gods may dream, not thinking men.” ||124.66||

A Painting by Huta: sense-shackled Man